You Are Not the Media

More than a decade ago, I gave a speech in Cleveland. During the Q&A, a man in the back asked me what I thought of the then-emerging Iran deal, and I hemmed and hawed my way through a bullshit answer that said nothing. As I was leaving, he approached me. “Listen,” he said firmly. “I’m a dentist. It’s my job to wake up in the morning and fix people’s teeth. It’s your job to tell me what to think about the Iran deal or Greenpeace or whatever. If my patient’s teeth end up falling out of their mouth, they’ll find another dentist. If your ideas about the world don’t help me better understand and navigate it, I’ll find another magazine. But that’s your job, and you have to do it.”

I thought about my dentist friend the day after Trump’s reelection, when Elon Musk posted on X, “You are the media now.”...